90 entries categorized "State Secrets Privilege / CIPA"

May 03, 2016

Politco reports a federal judge delivered a blow Monday to Twitter's drive to release more details on surveillance orders it receives, but the tech firm won a chance to try to reformulate its case. U.S. District Court Judge Yvonne Rogers said the government has the power to prohibit the release of classified information, barring claims Twitter made in a lawsuit filed two years ago challenging as unconstitutional the limits federal officials have placed on publication of some statistics about surveillance demands. "The First Amendment does not permit a person subject to secrecy obligations to disclose classified national security information," Rogers wrote, citing a 1980 Supreme Court case about a former CIA analyst publishing the names of CIA personnel overseas.

February 11, 2015

The Hill reports a district court in California has issued a ruling in favor of the National Security Agency in a long-running case over the spy agency’s collection of Internet records. The challenge against the controversial Upstream program was tossed out because additional defense from the government would have required “impermissible disclosure of state secret information,” Judge Jeffrey White wrote in his decision. Under the program — details of which were revealed through leaks from Edward Snowden and others — the NSA taps into the fiber cables that make up the backbone of the Internet and gathers information about people's online and phone communications. The agency then filters out communications of U.S. citizens, whose data is protected with legal defenses not extended to foreigners, and searches for “selectors” tied to a terrorist or other target.

September 17, 2014

Politico reports the next Edward Snowden may find it more difficult to leak government secrets. The Pentagon plans to issue new rules in the coming months requiring certain contractors that work with classified government networks to monitor what employees are doing in those systems. Information about employees’ browsing on those networks will be combined with data analysis tools to spot suspicious behavior such as a Middle East analyst rooting around in intelligence documents related to China or Russia or an employee accessing documents at unusual hours. The new monitoring regime is designed to give contractors early warnings that one of their employees may be stealing classified information either to leak it to the public as Snowden and Pvt. Chelsea Manning did or to pass it to a foreign government.

September 15, 2014

Politico reports warning of potential damage to U.S. national security, the Justice Department on Friday asked a federal judge to halt a civil lawsuit against one of the most prominent private organizations fighting Iran's nuclear program. The invocation of the state secrets privilege in Greek shipping magnate Victor Restis's lawsuit against United Against Nuclear Iran is unusual because the U.S. Government is not a party to the litigation, but is insisting that allowing the suit between the private parties to proceed any further will jeopardize American secrets that must be kept under wraps. "The Government has concluded that information that would be at risk of disclosure in discovery and further proceedings is properly subject to the state secrets privilege and should be excluded from this case. Further, because information subject to the state secrets privilege is inherently at risk of disclosure in further proceedings, the Government also seeks dismissal of this lawsuit," government lawyers wrote in legal memorandum supporting the motion. "The United States cannot publicly specify the particular information that is privileged, other than to state that the information is directly implicated by and at risk of disclosure in further litigation of plaintiffs’ claims."

March 13, 2014

McClatchy reports the White House has been withholding for five years more than 9,000 top-secret documents sought by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence for its investigation into the now-defunct CIA detention and interrogation program, even though President Barack Obama hasn’t exercised a claim of executive privilege. In contrast to public assertions that it supports the committee’s work, the White House has ignored or rejected offers in multiple meetings and in letters to find ways for the committee to review the records, a McClatchy investigation has found. The significance of the materials couldn’t be learned. But the administration’s refusal to turn them over or to agree to any compromise raises questions about what they would reveal about the CIA’s use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists in secret overseas prisons.

February 11, 2014

Wired reports after seven years of litigation, two trips to a federal appeals court and $3.8 million worth of lawyer time, the public has finally learned why a wheelchair-bound Stanford University scholar was cuffed, detained and denied a flight from San Francisco to Hawaii: FBI human error. FBI agent Kevin Kelley was investigating Muslims in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2004 when he checked the wrong box on a terrorism form, erroneously placing Rahinah Ibrahim on the no-fly list. Instead of admitting to the error, high-ranking President Barack Obama administration officials spent years covering it up. Again and again they asserted the so-called “state secrets privilege” to block the 48-year-old woman’s lawsuit, which sought only to clear her name.

December 06, 2013

12/06/13: The Miami Herald reports Japan's parliament approved on Friday a state secrets law that stiffens penalties for leaks by government officials and for journalists who seek such information, overriding criticism that it could be used to cover up government abuses and suppress civil liberties. The ruling coalition forced a vote on the bill in an upper house committee on Thursday. Despite stalling tactics by opposition parties, the full upper house approved the bill on Friday by 130 to 82. The more powerful lower house had approved the bill last week. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who is seeking to increase Japan's global security role and create a more authoritarian government at home, says the law is needed to protect national security and assuage US concerns over the risks of sharing strategically sensitive information with Tokyo. Critics worry the law could be used to hinder public disclosures, punish whistleblowers or muzzle the media since journalists could be jailed for seeking information they do not know is classified as secret. The bill allows heads of ministries and agencies to classify 23 vaguely worded types of information related to defense, diplomacy, counterintelligence and counterterrorism, almost indefinitely.

July 20, 2013

07/20/13: The New York Times reports the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee says she is planning a push to declassify hundreds of pages of a secret committee report that accuses the Central Intelligence Agency of misleading Congress and the White House about the agency’s detention and interrogation program, which is now defunct. The 6,000-page report, which took years to complete and cost more than $40 million, is the only detailed account to date of a program that set off a national debate about torture. The report has been the subject of a fierce partisan fight and a vigorous effort by the CIA to challenge its conclusions, and last month, the agency’s director, John O. Brennan, delivered a lengthy rebuttal to the report to committee leaders. The clash over the report is, at its core, a fight over who writes the history of what is perhaps the most bitterly disputed part of the American government’s response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. More than four years have passed since the CIA closed its secret prisons, and nearly a decade since agency interrogators subjected Qaeda detainees to the most brutal interrogation methods, including the near-drowning technique known as waterboarding.

July 08, 2013

07/08/13: The New York Times reports in more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation’s surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans while pursuing not only terrorism suspects, but also people possibly involved in nuclear proliferation, espionage and cyberattacks, officials say. The rulings, some nearly 100 pages long, reveal that the court has taken on a much more expansive role by regularly assessing broad constitutional questions and establishing important judicial precedents, with almost no public scrutiny, according to current and former officials familiar with the court’s classified decisions. The 11-member Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, was once mostly focused on approving case-by-case wiretapping orders. But since major changes in legislation and greater judicial oversight of intelligence operations were instituted six years ago, it has quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court, serving as the ultimate arbiter on surveillance issues and delivering opinions that will most likely shape intelligence practices for years to come, the officials said. Last month, a former National Security Agency contractor, Edward J. Snowden, leaked a classified order from the FISA court, which authorized the collection of all phone-tracing data from Verizon business customers. But the court’s still-secret decisions go far beyond any single surveillance order, the officials said. Unlike the Supreme Court, the FISA court hears from only one side in the case — the government — and its findings are almost never made public.

June 14, 2013

06/14/13: The Miami Herald reports a military judge invoked the potential for “grave damage to national security” on Thursday and announced that he will exclude both the public and the accused Saudi Arabian terrorist from his pre-trial hearing in the USS Cole bombing death-penalty case — the first closed session of the Barack Obama war court. The subject of the hearing, to be argued at 9 a.m. Friday, is a mystery. It appears on the war court docket with the word CLASSIFIED in red, but no name. Army Col. James Pohl, the judge, said Pentagon prosecutors demonstrated a “compelling governmental interest that public disclosure could result in grave damage to national security,” and that disclosure of material at the hearing “could reasonably be expected to damage national security, including intelligence sources and methods.” But Pohl left open the possibility that the public might be afforded a glimpse later. He said that, sometime afterward, intelligence agents will scrub a transcript of the secret things that were said and release the rest. He offered one hint in his explanation of why Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, 48, the accused, cannot attend: He’s “not the source of the information.”

June 12, 2013

06/12/13: The New York Times reports the American Civil Liberties Union sued the Obama administration on Tuesday over its “dragnet” collection
of logs of domestic phone calls, contending that the once-secret program
— whose existence was exposed last week by a former NSA contractor — is illegal and asking a judge to stop it and order the records purged. The lawsuit could set up an eventual Supreme Court test. It could also
focus attention on this disclosure amid the larger heap of top secret
surveillance matters revealed by Edward J. Snowden, the former NSA
contractor who came forward Sunday to say he was their source. The Justice Department declined to comment on the suit. In other lawsuits against national security policies, the government has
often persuaded courts to dismiss them without ruling on the merits by
arguing that litigation would reveal state secrets or that the plaintiffs could not prove they were personally affected and so lacked standing in court.

June 11, 2013

06/11/13: The New York Times reports Edward J. Snowden said he had leaked secret documents about National Security Agency surveillance to spark a public debate about civil liberties. President Obama, while deploring the leak, endorsed the same goal of a vigorous public discussion of the “trade-offs” between national security and personal privacy. But the legal and political obstacles to such a debate, whether in Congress or more broadly, are formidable. They only begin with the facts that the programs at issue are highly classified and that Mr. Snowden is now a hunted man, potentially facing a prison sentence for disclosing the very secrets that started the discussion that Mr. Obama welcomed. Congressional leaders of both parties have so far expressed support for the newly disclosed initiatives, and the legislation governing such surveillance was renewed for five years at the end of 2012. Representative Jim Langevin, a Rhode Island Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said on Monday that among those in Congress who are most informed, the consensus was strong and bipartisan. “Those who have been fully briefed are comfortable with the capabilities used, the way they have been used and the due diligence exercised in making sure the agency responsible for carrying out and using the tools has been doing so within confines of the law,” he said. “There is nothing nefarious going on here.” So far, there is no groundswell of public anger to shift Congressional views. In a Washington Post-Pew Research Center poll conducted after the NSA revelations, 56 percent of those polled said it was acceptable for the agency to get secret court orders to track the phone calls of millions of Americans; 41 percent said it was unacceptable.

June 08, 2013

06/08/13: CNN reports President Barack Obama has directed senior national security
leadership to prepare a list of targets for potential cyberattacks,
according to a "Top Secret" document published Friday by the British
newspaper The Guardian. The classified document marks the third time in three days that
highly sensitive government information has been leaked to The Guardian. The latest document, called Presidential Policy Directive/PPD-20, is
marked "TOP SECRET/NOFORN" which means it is not to be shared with
foreign nationals. CNN could not independently verify the directive but
it appears in the same format as other government directive documents.
"Top Secret" material is highly sensitive but it is not the highest
level of classification in the government. The presidential directive orders the federal government to "identify
potential targets" for "offensive" cyberoperations - essentially
cyberattacks. Under US law, presidential approval is
required for all cyberoperations. In the event an attack is ordered,
the president would specifically approve that use of force and troops
specializing in cyberoperation, a senior Pentagon official told CNN. The document spells out what has been known in far less detail until
now - that the United States is increasingly developing cyberwarfare
capability.

March 15, 2013

03/15/13: Wired's Threat Level reports a federal appeals court reinstated a lawsuit seeking Central Intelligence Agency documents outlining its drone targeted killing program, ruling Friday that the agency’s refusal to acknowledge the program and whether records exist about it contradicts public statements by top government officials, including President Barack Obama. The case concerns a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union in which the CIA has been refusing to confirm or deny the covert military use of drones to kill suspected terrorists overseas, despite Obama’s and even a former CIA director’s admission of the agency’s targeted killing program. With Friday’s decision, the ACLU’s case returns to a federal court, where a district judge had sided with the agency’s so-called "Glomar"response which allowed the CIA to neither confirm nor deny the existence of responsive records because doing so would expose national security secrets. The FOIA litigation dates to 2010, when the ACLU sued in federal court seeking records concerning the legal basis for carrying out targeted drone killings; any restrictions on those who may be targeted; any civilian casualties; any geographic limits on the program; the number of targeted killings that the agency has carried out; and the training, supervision, oversight, or discipline of drone operators. Last year, the same appeals court upheld the National Security Agency’s decision, citing Glomar, to withhold from the public documents confirming or denying any relationship it has with Google concerning encryption or cybersecurity.

March 11, 2013

03/11/13: The Associated Press reports the US Government,
led by the Pentagon and CIA, censored files that the public requested last year
under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) more often than at any time since
President Barack Obama took office.
Overall, the Obama Administration last year answered its highest number
of FOIA requests so far, and it slightly reduced its backlog of requests from
previous years. But it more often cited
legal provisions allowing the government to keep records or parts of its
records secret, especially the state secrets privilege. Still, the AP’s analysis showed government
released all or portions of the information that citizens, journalists,
businesses and others sought at about the same rate as the previous three years.

December 14, 2012

12/14/12: Wired's Threat Level reports a federal judge on Friday is to hold the first hearing following an appellate court’s decision reinstating allegations that the government is siphoning Americans’ communications from telecoms to the National Security Agency without warrants. The new judge on the case, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White of San Francisco, notes a 2007 court case in which a federal judge declined the government’s privilege by ruling federal spy laws barred, or “preempted” the doctrine. White notes that an appellate court did not address the issue when that case was on appeal to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

December 13, 2012

12/13/12: The BBC reports a Royal Navy petty officer who offered nuclear submarine secrets to MI5 agents posing as Russian spies has been jailed for eight years. Edward Devenney, gathered classified coding material after being passed over for promotion, the court was told. He had been "prepared to betray his country and his colleagues", said Mr Justice Saunders at the Old Bailey. Devenney admitted breaching the Official Secrets Act.

October 27, 2012

10/27/12: Foreign Policy posted an article by William Burr questioning why well-known information is still kept secret. While collecting and comparing recently declassified documents on the Cuban missile crisis, I reviewed copies of formerly top secret notes prepared by Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric. Gilpatric was a member of the National Security Council "ExComm" and took circumspect notes of the meetings, mostly relating to actions for which he had follow-up responsibilities. Today, those notes are available in two versions, one released in 2009 under the FOIA by the Department of Defense and the other in the "Sensitive Records on Cuba" collection at the National Archives.

October 25, 2012

10/25/12: Wired's Threat Level reports the administration is again arguing that a lawsuit accusing the National Security Agency of vacuuming up Americans’ electronic communications without warrants threatens national security and would expose state secrets if litigated. “This case may be dismissed on the ground that its very subject matter constitutes a state secret,” the government said in a legal filing in San Francisco federal court. Brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the case is now four years old and its merits have never been litigated. The civil rights group claims that the major telecoms provided the NSA a warrantless backdoor to the nation’s communication backbone.

September 20, 2012

09/20/2012: The BBC reports a police report into the death of ex-Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko will be redacted to omit a section about his alleged links to British intelligence. Mr Litvinenko, 43, is thought to have been poisoned with polonium-210 after having tea with two Russians at a central London hotel in November 2006.

September 19, 2012

09/19/12: The Blog of Legal Times reports that the defendants
in a leak case in Washington are challenging the Justice Department’s recent
filing of confidential court papers in the case, saying that the Government
should be required to justify the secrecy.
Prosecutors handling the case against Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, a former
State Department contractor who is charged with disclosing classified
information to a reporter, recently filed court papers in the chambers of US
District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly.
Kim has asked the District Court to require the Government to explain
why the defense should be kept in the dark after more than two years of
litigation. “The adversary process is
the cornerstone of the American system of justice,” defense counsel said in a
court filing Monday. “Courts routinely
disfavor ex parte proceedings.”

August 16, 2012

08/16/12: The LA Times reports a federal judge Tuesday dismissed a lawsuit filed against the US government and the FBI over the agency’s spying on Orange County Muslims, ruling that allowing the suit to go forward would risk divulging sensitive state secrets. US District Judge Cormac J. Carney wrote that “the state secrets privilege may unfortunately mean the sacrifice of individual liberties for the sake of national security.” The judge wrote that he reached the decision reluctantly after reviewing confidential declarations filed by top FBI officials, but he was convinced that the suit involved “intelligence that, if disclosed, would significantly compromise national security.” The lawsuit was centered on the actions of Craig Monteilh, who says he posed as a Muslim convert at the behest of the FBI to collect information at Orange County mosques.

June 29, 2012

06/29/12: The Blog of Legal Times reports the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) asked a federal appeals court in Washington Friday not to delay hearing a dispute over access to any government documents concerning the use of drones to conduct targeted killings. The Justice Department, representing the CIA, earlier this month asked the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit to send the dispute back to the trial court for additional proceedings. DOJ’s request followed the government’s June 20 filing in a related Freedom of Information Act case pending in Manhattan federal district court. In the New York filing, DOJ lawyers urged a trial judge to shut down the litigation, saying, among other things, that the “requests involve highly classified information.”

June 28, 2012

06/28/12: Lawfare features a post by Steve Vladeck discussing how much difficulty plaintiffs have had in suing the US government over post-September 11 governmental abuses. Vladeck argues the courts have created a “national security canon,” a body of rules unique to national security cases that, at least thus far, all cut against allowing relief in suits that might otherwise be able to proceed to judgment. The essay suggests that as the national security canon becomes more deeply ingrained, the likelihood increases that it will expand into contexts other than those in which it has thus far been recognized.

June 22, 2012

06/22/12: Secrecy News reports a bill “to provide safe, fair, and responsible procedures and standards for resolving claims of state secrets privilege” was introduced in the House of Representatives this week by Representative Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) and several Democratic colleagues. Essentially, the bill would require courts to render an independent assessment of the validity of a government assertion of the state secrets privilege, rather than simply deferring to the claim. When the privilege is properly asserted, courts would be required to consider the feasibility of introducing non-privileged substitutes for privileged evidence. Such measures would make it more likely that cases could proceed to adjudication even when discrete pieces of evidence are found to be privileged.

May 22, 2012

05/22/12: Secrecy News reports the publication of leaked classified documents by WikiLeaks continues to confound government officials and to generate some unusual legal tangles. Last month, attorneys for a prisoner detained at Guantanamo Bay asked a federal court to nullify the restrictions that the government has imposed on access to and dissemination of the leaked records, so that the prisoner can prepare a response to the disclosures contained in them. The government policy on this matter is unworkable and incoherent, argued attorneys for detainee Abdulhadi Omer Mahmoud Faraj in an April 18 motion in the US District Court for the District of Columbia. Worse, they said, it is damaging and unfair to their client.

May 16, 2012

05/16/12: The Open Society Justice Initiative reports that today the European Court of Human Rights will hear a complaint relating to the extraordinary renditions program in the case of El Masri v Macedonia. El Masri claims that he was seized by Macedonian agents and held for 23 days, before being handed over to the Central Intelligence Agency and rendered to Afghanistan where he was detained, interrogated, subjected to sustained violence. He previous brought suit in the United States, though the case was dismissed on state secrets grounds.

May 11, 2012

05/11/12: Legal Times reports a federal appeals court in Washington today said any communication about cybersecurity and encryption between Google and the National Security Agency (NSA) can remain secret. The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit upheld the dismissal of a public records suit by an advocate for online privacy rights, the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Writing for a unanimous three-judge panel, Judge Janice Rogers Brown rejected the argument that any partnership between Google and the NSA should be officially disclosed through a records request because the company and the agency's connection was revealed earlier in news articles. The court said NSA has never officially acknowledged a collaboration with Google and “the national media are not capable of waiving NSA’s statutory authority to protect information related to its functions and activities.”

April 24, 2012

04/24/12: The Secrecy News blog reports that government attorneys yesterday asked a court for an extension of time to respond to two Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits seeking disclosure of records pertaining to “alleged targeted lethal operations” conducted by the CIA, including the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki. The attorneys’ request seems to portend a possible change in the government’s persistent refusal to acknowledge the widely reported fact of the CIA’s use of drones in targeted killing operations. Judge Colleen McMahon granted the Government’s request for an extension until May 21, 2012.

March 22, 2012

03/22/12: The Christian Science Monitor reports that a high-profile former government scientist was sentenced Wednesday for attempted espionage, conspiracy to defraud the United States, and tax evasion. Former NASA scientist, Stewart David Nozette, was sentenced to 13 years in prison. In addition, he is required to pay $217,000 to the government. Nozette pleaded guilty in September to providing classified information to a person he believed to be an Israeli intelligence officer, who was actually an FBI agent. He also pleaded guilty in January 2009 to fraud and tax charges.

November 21, 2011

11/21/11: The Missoulian reports that South Africa's parliament prepared Monday for a vote the following day on a state secrets bill that critics within and outside the governing party said would smother freedom of expression and make it harder to fight corruption. The African National Congress, which holds a majority of parliament's seats, sponsored the bill, making it likely it would become law. The ANC said South Africa needs to update apartheid-era legislation defining state secrets and imposing penalties for their disclosure.

November 16, 2011

11/16/11: The Miami Herald reports that a Marine Corps whistleblower who exposed the service's failure to quickly deliver life-saving armored vehicles and other gear to troops in Iraq can return to work after military authorities reinstated his top-secret security clearance. Franz Gayl, a senior civilian employee, was close to losing his job as a science and technology adviser at Marine Corps headquarters following allegations that an unsecure flash drive had been inserted into his work computers.

October 30, 2011

10/30/11: The Washington Times reports that the Army is preparing to hold a pre-trial hearing that for the first time will disclose the government’s case in detail against the soldier accused of disseminating thousands of classified documents that were aired on the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks. A spokeswoman for the Military District of Washington at Fort McNair, which has jurisdiction over the proceedings, said the investigative hearing, known as an Article 32, will be held “in the Washington area.”

September 18, 2011

09/18/11: The New York Review of Books features a new article by David Cole, addressing what, precisely, did and did not change after September 11, particularly with respect to law, liberty, and security. Cole discusses the response of the Bush and Obama administrations to terrorism, concluding that one of the most important lessons of the past decade may be that the rule of law has proved far more resilient than many would have predicted.

September 10, 2011

09/10/11: The Miami Herald reports on the aftermath of the latest WikiLeaks cable release. The cables were published in full, without the redaction of any names. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland branded the action "irresponsible, reckless and frankly dangerous," and the US says the release exposes the names of hundreds of sensitive sources. But an Associated Press review of the sources found several of them comfortable with their names in the open and no one fearing death. Others are already dead, their names cited as sensitive in the context of long-resolved conflicts or situations. Some have publicly written or testified at hearings about the supposedly confidential information they provided the US government.

August 03, 2011

08/03/11: JURIST reports that US Attorney General Eric Holder invoked the state secrets privilege Monday to block evidence in a lawsuit against the FBI over its investigation into Muslim mosques. The Department of Justice also filed a motion to dismiss claims and for summary judgment in the US District Court for the Central District of California claiming that without the privileged information many of the claims against the FBI could not continue.

May 23, 2011

05/23/11: Wired.com reports that the Supreme Court on Monday imposed a slight limitation on the government’s ability to invoke the state secrets privilege in lawsuits that threaten to expose classified, national security information. The unanimous court found that, if the government is going to withhold evidence by citing the privilege, it is not entitled to monetary damages in contractual disputes. The justices, without questioning the government’s privilege, ruled it would not be fair for the government to win monetary awards if the government was not required to turn over evidence to the other side.

April 06, 2011

04/06/11: The Los Angeles Times has published an op-ed by Jameel Jaffer of the ACLU arguing that secrecy in the national security realm harms US democracy. He argues that the public knows too little about the government's national security and counterterrosim policies, and without leaks it would be even more ill-informed. But recent leaks show that government officials feel that certain information must be made public - if through informal channels - even as the organizations that employ them work to quash FOIA lawsuits and other formal mechanisms to achieve disclosure.

February 28, 2011

02/28/11: Robert Chesney has posted that the International Association of Constitutional Law, Research Group on Constitutional Responses to Terrorism, has announced a call for papers to be delivered at an international conference on “Secrecy, National Security, and the Vindication of Constitutional Law” hosted by Bocconi University in Milan, Italy, on December 1-2, 2011.

February 20, 2011

02/20/11: The New York Times reports that Dennis Montgomery, a California computer programmer, won $20 million in government contracts for technology he claimed could catch terrorists that appears to have been a hoax. The DOJ, which in the last few months has gotten protective orders from two federal judges keeping details of the technology out of court, says it is guarding state secrets that would threaten national security if disclosed. But others involved in the case say that what the government is trying to avoid is public embarrassment over evidence that Montgomery bamboozled federal officials.

February 11, 2011

02/11/11: The New York Times reports that the CIA invoked state secrets to block a personal injury case by a former CIA employee. Kevin M. Shipp sued the agency in late 2001, claiming it had placed him and his family in a mold-contaminated home in Texas that made them all sick and required them to destroy most of their possessions. The CIA responded by invoking the state secrets privilege and the lawsuit was dismissed without any hearing on the merits. Shipp is contending that CIA officials abused the State Secrets Privilege in an effort to cover up their own negligence.

December 09, 2010

12/09/10: The American Civil Liberties Union will testify today before a House Judiciary subcommittee that the executive branch of the US government has obtained dangerously broad powers. Laura W. Murphy, Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office, will also offer a preview of other big issues likely to be faced by the new Congress involving civil liberties and national security.

12/09/10: JURIST reports that the American Civil Liberties Union on Tuesday filed an appeal with the US Supreme Court to overturn a ruling dismissing its suit over the CIA's extraordinary rendition program. In its petition for certiorari, the ACLU argued that changes in the way the state secrets privilege has been applied warrant a Supreme Court review.

November 22, 2010

11/22/10: BBC reports that UK Home Secretary Theresa May has lost a legal bid to force the July 7 inquests to hear top-secret evidence behind closed doors. Lady Justice Hallett, in her ruling on November 3, concluded that the power to exclude the public from certain hearings in the interests of national security did not include "interested persons", such as the bereaved relatives, who were legally entitled to be represented at the inquests. Two Appeal Court judges sitting in the High Court have now upheld that ruling. Fifty-two people died in suicide attacks on three London Underground trains and a bus in July 2005. HT to The Lift.

November 19, 2010

11/19/10: The Blog of Legal Times reports that the full US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit this week unanimously declined to adopt a court-wide policy that would give the US Justice Department greater flexibility in incorporating classified opinions in other pending Guantánamo Bay detainee cases.

November 17, 2010

11/17/10: The Miami Herald reports that a British government decision to settle a lawsuit by former Guantánamo detainees who claimed they were tortured after they were turnedover to US authorities is bringing renewed attention to US detention policies. The settlements have triggered calls from the American Civil Liberties Union for the Obama administration to stop invoking the state secrets privilege to keep details of what happened to detainees from being aired in American courts.

September 28, 2010

09/28/10: The Washington Times reports that the Supreme Court will review a longstanding dispute between the Pentagon and two contractors. The issue before the court involves the state-secrets privilege, which typically arises in national security and terrorism cases. In this case, the issue is whether the government's claims about national security have precluded the companies' ability to defend their position. A federal appeals court sided with the government.

September 09, 2010

09/09/10: SCOTUSblog reports that the en banc Ninth Circuit Court on Wednesday dismissed the
latest challenge to the
legality of the Central Intelligence Agency’s alleged program of
“rendition” of terrorism suspects to other countries for questioning and
perhaps for torture. Dividing 6-5, the Court relied on a broad “state
secrets” theory to put a stop — before any evidence was offered — to a
case against a small airplane operator that allegedly was the CIA’s
flight crew for those trips.

August 10, 2010

08/10/10: Wired reports that the owner of an internet service provider who mounted a high-profile
court challenge to a secret FBI records demand has finally been
partially released from a 6-year-old gag order that forced him to keep
his role in the case a secret from even his closest friends and family.
He can now identify himself and discuss the case, although he still
can’t reveal what information the FBI sought. Nicholas Merrill, 37, was president of New York-based Calyx Internet Access,
when he received a so-called “national security letter” from the FBI in
February 2004 demanding records of one of his customers.

08/10/10: The Washington Post reports that following the partial lifting of his gag order 11 days ago as a result
of an FBI settlement, Nicholas Merrill can speak openly for the first time about
the experience, although he cannot disclose the full scope of the data
demanded.

March 31, 2010

03/31/10: Politico reports that a federal judge is offering to drop disclipinary and contempt
proceedings against Central Intelligence Agency lawyers and officials,
including former CIA director George Tenet, over alleged abuse of the
state secrets privilege in a long-running lawsuit, if Attorney General
Eric Holder formally notifies Congress and the inspectors general about
the alleged misconduct. Judge Royce Lamberth proposed the somewhat unusual compromise in an opinion filed Tuesday in the suit, brought by a former Drug Enforcement Administration agent, Richard Horn.